NIH Targets $500 Million At Opioid Crisis

Dr. Nora Volkow, director at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and National Institutes of Health (NIH), holds up a narcan nasal spray (naloxone) during a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing concerning federal efforts to combat the opioid crisis, October 25, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The National Institutes of Health is explaining how it will spend $500 million in research funds Congress appropriated to address the current opioid crisis.

The list of objectives, published this morning in the Journal of the American Medical Association, includes: developing new medications to treat opioid addiction; tinkering with existing medications so they can be taken less often; improving medicines that reverse overdoses; developing new models of caring for people with opioid addiction in the healthcare and criminal justice systems; determining the best way to care for newborns in opioid withdrawal; discovering and validating new targets for non-addictive pain drugs and devices, and partnering with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate new pain and addiction medications. The $500 million will be distributed as research grants after a call for proposals later this summer.

“I’m most excited about resources that will allow us to accelerate development of new treatments for opioid addiction,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the NIH. “This will basically double the number of projects we can do for medication” beyond what NIDA is doing already, she says.

Research funding will also go towards developing and testing ways to make better use of the medications for opioid addiction that are already available, Volkow said, so that strategies proven to work and get medications to more patients that could benefit can be implemented in many places. “We need to develop new models of care to expand [treatment] capacity,” she said, so emergency physicians and primary care doctors will be involved in addiction care, too.

Most of the objectives make sense, said Andrew Kolodny, co-director of opioid policy research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. But he took issue with a proposed private-public partnership with pharmaceutical companies to develop non-addictive pain medications. “It’s a government handout to the same industry that created this mess,” he said. “It doesn't make sense, during the midst of an opioid addiction epidemic, to be using scarce dollars for pain treatments.”

Pharmaceutical companies don’t need additional coaxing and government funding to develop chronic pain medications he said: “Opioids were aggressively marketed for chronic pain because it’s such a large market.” Non-addictive pain medications are already available but began to be underprescribed as opioids were overprescribed, leading to the current epidemic of addiction. In addition to the research funding from the NIH, Kolodny would like to see other parts of the federal government like the Food and Drug Administration step in to promote more cautious prescribing of opioids, and funding to make sure people addicted to opioids can access effective treatment.

Ellie Kincaid is an assistant editor at Forbes covering medicine and health care. She's previously written about scientific research and healthcare providers who develop innovative ways to care for their patients for The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, Men's Journal,...